The wrong kind of rupture

摘要

WITH ONLY two parties on the ballot, both of them supporters of President Patrice Talon, Benin's general election on April 28th was an unhappy throwback to the country's post-independence Marxist era, when voters had no real choice at all. This was all the more dispiriting because Benin was in the vanguard of Africa's democratic revival in the early 1990s, when its long-serving leader, Mathieu Kerekou, became the first incumbent president on the continent to let his people peacefully vote him out of office. Since then, the Beni-nois have managed freely to elect three more presidents, and prevented Mr Talon's predecessor from flouting the constitution's two-term limit. This time, however, new electoral laws made it cumbersome and expensive to field candidates. All opposition parties were barred for not following them to the letter. So Beninois voted with their backsides: only 27% of them bothered to go to the polls.